Hey, church people faithfully streaming low budget, shaky, amateur daily prayer or Sunday service from your messy house because you want to serve your church community and offer what you can to God in love: that’s your perfume poured over Jesus’ feet. It’s beautiful. Keep going.

Record the video in advance, and present it as if it were live during normal church service times.

Facebook Premiere if you’d rather record your service in advance, edit it, and then deliver it on Sunday morning as if it’s a live event. (1-min tutorial)This also allows you and your volunteers to still comment and reply during the livestream on your Facebook page.

To record each section of the sermon (hosts, musicians, pre-service offertory, and preacher)

Someone can record each of them with similar lighting and sound quality.

With experience, each group can record their parts from their own homes and send a copy of their recording to person editing the video. The can upload their part to Google Drive and share the link. Or they can deliver a USB drive to the video editor.

Someone needs merge the various video portions together on a video editing software. (eg. Filmora, iMovie, FCPX, Movavi, Premiere) You can get free images from https://www.pexels.com

When uploading, check the “Premiere” button (also available on Youtube). Insert call-to-action links in the description field under the title. Schedule the video to go live at a specific time, which will enable chat at the set time.

Recruit a few online greeters on page to interact with your community. This includes welcoming, posting links to notes and giving options, ask or answer questions (eg “Where are you watching from?”), post lyrics to songs, lead people to take next steps (eg. enter Zoom chatroom), and tell all “goodbye” or “See you next week.”

As you have time, you can take a free course on Facebook options.

Notify those on your church email list 1-12 hours before or text lists 10 minute before your online church services starts. If you use Facebook, you’ll be able to reach some (roughly ⅓) of your existing page followers via a notification that your church is “going live.” Texting and email reaches more.

Expand to other platforms

Youtube Live – Log into a Youtube account (https://www.youtube.com) belonging to your church, click on the video camera icon in upper right. On a desktop, go to Creator Studio tools, then go to the ‘Live Streaming’ tab. On the YouTube app on mobile, create a live stream.Youtube is incentivized by 3rd party ad buyers to get your video seen by more viewers than Facebook. It takes at least 24 hours to get Streaming for Youtube for your organization’s account. https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/9227509?hl=en As you have time, you can take a free class by Youtube here.

This can be kept private or live-streamed publicly. These meetings can be for your entire church, dialogue between you and a missionary or evangelist at another location). There should be smaller group gatherings throughout the week, as well as online planning discussions and prayer meetings.

This does not have the distractions on Facebook pages such as notifications, chats, and ads. This may distract some people from engaging in your online service.

It conveniently has features to allow viewers to read the Bible passage, sermon notes, request prayer, chat with friends, and give online.

Its free, but you must still get a True Livestream service to synchronize from the platform to each livestream (eg. Facebook Live and Youtube Live) Livestream services include https://restream.io/pricing, TrueGOD.tv, ChurchStreaming.tv Boxcast.com

Host workspace (easy to use platform for hosts, includes a host chat and extra

You face some distinct benefits of connecting with your church community online. For one, you may better reach the 40-60% of people that are inactive. 1 You come with a foundation of relationships, and understanding of your local church and community culture. And you have no limit on what time of the week you can post video, images, and any engagement with your online church.